With just six months left to conclude the pact under a deadline set in 2007, delegates said they saw little common ground at the talks in the German city of Bonn, held under the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The deal, to be hammered out in Copenhagen in December, is supposed to take effect from 2012, when the current pledges of the Kyoto Protocol run out.

The big issues are who should pledge to cut their emissions of heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases and when, and how to channel money and technology to poor countries to cope with climate change and switch to low-carbon energy.

Compared with previous sessions, "the attitudes have been more constructive but the level of ambition is lower," France's climate ambassador, Brice Lalonde told AFP.

"Everybody knows that global emissions have to be halved by 2050 (compared with 1990 levels), which implies that industrialised countries reduce theirs by 80 percent. And everyone knows that emissions by developing countries have to start falling by 2025 at the latest," he said.

"But nobody's signing up."

Rich countries -- who are historically most to blame for today's problems -- are being told by poor nations to make deep emission cuts, mostly in the range of 25-40 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels. Some nations, including China, have said 40 percent must be a minimum.

The emerging giants, which are already big polluters and will be the greenhouse-gas culprits of the tomorrow, are under pressure to come up with detailed commitments as to what they intend to do to bring their pollution under control.

China, India, Brazil and others have refused to sign up to binding emissions targets, saying this will hamper their rise out of poverty.

They say they are willing to take other measures that would slow their likely growth in emissions, but they have not spelt out what these would be, and tie such action to help from the West.

"The idea among developing countries of only making undertakings in exchange for financial support has to be abandoned," said Lalonde.

"The European Union is willing to pay, but on the basis of a robust architecture and provided we know what efforts we are going to support, especially during a time of (economic) crisis," he said.

The Copenhagen meeting is the designated terminus of the so-called "Bali Road Map" but the process has been dogged by complexity and squabbles between rich and poor nations and among rich nations themselves.

Reducing emissions has become a fiercely-contested issue because of the cost of easing use of oil, gas and coal, the cheap and abundant "fossil" fuels that meet most of the world's energy needs.

Scientists, though, are clamouring for deep early cuts.

According to an estimate published on Thursday, positions staked out at the UN talks leave virtually no chance of meeting a target of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), a figure that has been widely endorsed as a safe limit.

Three more rounds are left under the UNFCCC banner before Copenhagen when the proposals made in Bonn will have to be whittled down into a negotiation blueprint.

There are also a range of meetings among major emitters, at the Group of Eight (G8) and at a reported UN climate summit in New York in September that are intended to give a political push.

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